The panel making the choice has, unanimously, gone for those promising convergence. Or to put it more simply, the winners are those who have made firm commitments to basing their news services on the skills of newspaper journalists.

The most pronounced of these is the winning bid for Scotland, the Scottish News Consortium, combining Johnston Press, Newsquest's Herald and Times group, and DC Thomson. Together they are currently struggling to employ 1,000 newspaper journalists.

Wales Live combines the hard news television focus of Ulster TV with a well-regarded local newspaper chain called NWN Media, based in Mold, Flintshire, whose offices there will host a studio serving neglected north Wales, said to be alienated by the Cardiff-based approach.

News 3, the consortium of Trinity Mirror, the Press Association and Ten Alps, aiming to serve Tyne Tees and Border, has promised to base its studio at Trinity Mirror's Newcastle Chronicle.

All are adding in plans for citizen journalists and active websites.

The panel felt they could safely do this and spurn the incumbents, STV with ITN, because, under existing employment regulation, the winners have to take on the otherwise redundant television journalists already supplying the services.

So, in a sense, they are hoping the pilots will have the best of all worlds: a broader news-gathering network, stories that are sourced from outside the main cities, plus some fresh blood at the top, while trained television staff underpin the operation. UTV is even being trusted to import its go-getting approach across the Irish Sea, something that will shock the tiny elite who run BBC Wales and S4C.

This approach is also rather canny, politically speaking. Newspapers are wilting under the massive changes of reduced classified advertising, web-based search and drooping sales.

The winners are going to harry Conservative opponents of the pilots. The proposed public cash of £47m over two years could also go some way to providing an interim subsidy as newsprint and web journalism adapt to a multimedia future.

The panel's chairman, Richard Hooper, points to the enthusiasm and degree of commitment showed by the bidders, who seem to have been unfazed by the political uncertainty surrounding this project. The process of bidding has also released a genie, especially within Wales and Scotland, where the degree of discontent about the quality and choice of news in what are devolved nations has been clearly exposed and is running high.